Integration of additive manufacturing into process chain of porcelain preservation

Relic restoration and preservation is a huge market. Antique Chinese Porcelain, which is regarded as a symbolic type of artefacts representing Chinese art, craft and culture, has attracted significant study into its preservation, crossing the fields of policy-making, science and emerging technologies. In recent years, Additive Manufacturing (AM) has demonstrated its advantages in the restoration of relics made of a variety of materials. However, the study of its implementation with antique porcelain, which not only has different shapes, but also glossy surface and rich colours, still remains in its infancy.

This paper presents the case studies into the application of AM of antique porcelain preservations and creation. The studies include one practice converting the image of a vase on a Chinese painting to a 3D object with AM and another practice that applied AM to replicate an antique Famille-rose porcelain piece featuring rich colour in order to restore the missing pieces on a window in the Palace Museum, Beijing. The aim is to use AM polymer to simulate the visual features of antique porcelain. It was found that with the proper set-up of parameters and integration of other technologies and skills, AM with polymer materials also can support the replication of the features of antique porcelain to a significant extent. However, the glossy surface of porcelain made it difficult to acquire the surface details. In addition, the rich colours of Famille-rose porcelain were not only presented challenges with regard to directly obtain its colour features through 3D scanning, but also limited the application of AM owing to the limited colour series of 3D printing materials. In this paper, integrated methods were proposed and tested to address the above challenges which could impact on the application of AM in imitating porcelain features while attempting to contribute to its preservation and creation.